My Most Excellent Year (23 page)

Dear Mama,

I wish somebody could have told me how many invisible land mines there are when you make friends with a little kid. Because if I knew that up front, maybe I wouldn’t be doing such a ginky job.

Hucky spent the weekend at our house. Since it was his first sleepover ever, Pop and I decided we were going to make it a special one, but when we saw him waiting for us on the Institute porch—carrying his stuffed dog Shut-the-Door and a suitcase so small you wouldn’t figure anything could fit inside—it sort of hit me like a
punch in the stomach that he looked really little and really scared.
That’s me when I was six. I remember how afraid I was to spend a weekend with Aunt Babe once it was just me and Pop. What was
that
all about?
The good news is that Hucky is a whole lot braver than I was, and if he really had cold feet, he didn’t show them for long. As a matter of fact, he got a handle on the whole sleepover routine in about a minute and a half.

• Before we’d gone even a block, he discovered the Mazda’s navigational system, and he never took his eyes off of it. Pop offered to show him Mars, but Hucky didn’t believe him until it popped onto the screen. It’s a good thing he’s never been to Nashua, New Hampshire, or else we’d have been busted.
  
• When Pop unlocked the front door of the house, Nehi was already waiting for us. He ignored me and Pop completely (like we aren’t the ones who’ve been feeding him for six years) so he could grab Hucky by the left sleeve and drag him up the stairs to my room. Hucky knew right away which bed was his because (a) Nehi was bouncing up and down on it and (b) there was a
  Mary Poppins
  poster on the wall above it, covering up most of Augie’s Bette Davis pictures.
  
• We all went to the grocery store so Hucky could pick out our menu. French fries, melon, pasta, potato chips, and chocolate milk. (I smuggled in some chicken strips while Hucky was debating about Tater Tots.) Pop was in charge of dinner, but he let Hucky help. Together they invented Cantaloupe Linguini. It wasn’t as gross as the hot-dogs-and-maple-syrup
  that Augie and I lived on for a whole summer, but it was definitely in the same ballpark.
  
• Pop built a fire after we cleaned up the kitchen and Hucky had his first s’more. Almost. He was a little suspicious when he got a good look at it all glopped together like that, so he insisted on eating each of the ingredients separately—which kind of defeated the whole purpose.
       “Let me just melt it for you,” I insisted.
       “
  No!”
  he signed back.
  “I don’t like it
  !”
       “Do you like graham crackers and marshmallows and Hershey’s bars?” I demanded.
       
  “Yes.”
       “Then that’s impossible!”
  
• Pop showed Hucky how much sign language I’d taught him, but he somehow wound up saying “I am a horse.” Hucky thought that was about the funniest thing he’d ever heard in his life. So Hucky showed Pop how well he can finger-spell. He did okay with the preliminaries, but then “hamburger” came out “hangabur”—which Pop thought was about the funniest thing he’d ever heard in
  his
  life. He even got a mad face as a reward.
  
• Pop tucked Hucky into bed and then we both read him part of
  The Enormous Egg
  . (Pop’s actually a lot better at sign language than he thinks. Somebody must be coaching him. Gee, I wonder who? Am I
  really
  not supposed to know that he’s dating Lori??) But before the baby Triceratops could even
  hatch, Hucky was already yawning. He grabbed on to Shut-the-Door and turned over onto his side so he could see Mary Poppins on his wall. Then Nehi snuggled up against him, and he was out like a light.
  
• Pop turned off the lamp, kissed me good night, and I wasn’t too far behind.
  

If it had ended there, it would have been one of the better days of my year. But around 2:30 in the morning—right in the middle of a dream about Augie playing left field for the White Sox—it got really cold at Comiskey Park. That was because Nehi had pulled off all my blankets and sheets while he was poking his nose into my neck like he always does when it’s time for me to get up for school. But now he was also yanking on my sleeve too, and by the time I woke up enough to figure out it was still dark, I was also awake enough to hear Hucky crying. It wasn’t very loud and it almost sounded like coughing—but it got me up on my feet pretty fast anyway. Nehi had already jumped back onto Hucky’s bed and begun pacing back and forth like he was saying “
Do
something!” Do
what
? Mama, his hands were clenched into two little fists and his whole body was scrunched up and shaking like a catcher who’s just been really badly hurt—but he was still sound asleep. So I couldn’t even laugh him out of it the way you used to do whenever I had a bad dream. The only thing I could think of was to wrap his arms back around Shut-the-Door and then sit on the edge of his bed and keep patting his head to see if it made a difference.
T.C., you’re SO out of your league here! Get Pop. Call Mrs. Jordan. Anybody who knows what they’re doing!
It felt
like we were there for most of the night, but the sobbing finally got quieter and quieter until it stopped completely—and Nehi even lay back down, keeping one eye open like he was still at Orange Alert. I guess I didn’t fix what was broken, but it was the best I could come up with in the middle of the night. And any hoser probably could have done better.

Mama, I
really
need some help here.

I love you,

T.C.

Dear Angie,

Remember when you started rehearsals for
Mame
and you discovered muscles that hadn’t been invented yet? Because I have one in my left butt that even scientists couldn’t know about.

In
Kiss Me, Kate
I play a scoundrel who loves Lois (Lee Meyerhoff) but who can’t stop gambling—so in between dances, he’s dodging mobsters and getting everybody else into trouble right along with him. It’s definitely a stretch for me. I mean, the kids are so used to my Katharine Hepburn, they never knew what kind of a range I had before.

But the star of the show is definitely Alé. When Mrs. Packer blocked her in “Wunderbar” and “So in Love With You Am I,” me and Andy and the rest of the cast just sat on the edge of the stage to watch and listen. (We found out later that you could hear her as far away as the cafeteria, which is why about thirty civilians snuck into the back of the auditorium for a closer look too.) She has the kind of smoky voice that’s part Lena Horne, part Juanita Hall, and the rest of it like nobody you ever heard before in your life. And she knows how to sell “hot.” Tick had better move fast before the competition drowns him. And speaking of drowning, I qualified as a near-fatality at swim practice this afternoon. Tick was butterflying in the lane next to me, but I got assigned a half a lap behind Andy. Imagine the view every time I looked up. I accidentally discovered that it’s not a good idea to hyperventilate in eight feet of chlorinated water.